Thereby, it is characteristic of emotions that they involve the ascription of an evaluative property. Which emotions and passions these are in the case of populism and that they include but are not limited to antagonistic political emotions will become clearer in the following. Threat or Corrective for Democracy? Anger and Mourning on the American Right, Empathy and Moral Development. My paper accordingly offers a descriptive account of what is distinctive about populist (appeals to) affects. Although generally appreciative of political emotions, Nussbaum is highly critical of antagonistic emotions, such as fear and anger (2013: 31477, 2016). Resentment, Generosity, Justice, Collective Emotions. It presumes that the frustrated popular demands are justified and that, therefore, the government's unresponsiveness to them is morally blameworthy (Rico, Guinjoan, and Anduiza Reference Rico, Guinjoan and Anduiza2017). In light of such limitations, there is a need for an analysis of populism that takes seriously its entanglement with affects in all their variety without succumbing to the danger of uncritically adopting long-standing cultural prejudices about affects. Accordingly, in this regard, populist affects cannot be special. Even if both liberal and radical democrats such as Nussbaum and Mouffe thus embrace affectivity as an integral part of politics, they still call for a different set of emotions and passions. However, the appeal to what Laclau calls a vague feeling of solidarity and what I have specified as empathetic, sympathetic, and group-based emotions is not enough to constitute the collective identity of the people (Laclau Reference Laclau2007: 74, 93). Although this is partly true, it captures only one side of the picture. Political Emotions. My emotions as a liberal individualist can still involve a reference to the community as a whole as well as to those with whom I share my concerns. 1. One of the biggest risks to the future of civilization is AI. In other words, by appealing to emotions of anger rather than only to frustration, lacks are turned into demands and requests are turned into claims (Laclau Reference Laclau2007: 74, 86). None of the three types of affects is bound to any specific ideology. It demands an analysis of populist affects that disentangles the descriptive question of what is characteristic of populist (appeals to) affects and the normative question of what makes (some or all) forms of populism problematic. It also challenges the World Banks own approach to I do so for two reasons: first, they neutralize the concept of populism; and second, they highlight the role of affects. Sixty-seven per cent voted for the motion that the rise of populism is a dangerous thing for society, 14 per cent against and 19 per cent were undecided. After slightly more than 30 minutes of debate and impassioned speeches, the debate concluded and the audience was asked to vote again. Deliberation, Motivation, and the Nature of Value, Love, Friendship, and the Self. However, the fact that it is characteristic of populism that all established parties are an object of negative identification (Melndez and Rovira Kaltwasser Reference Melndez and Kaltwasser2019) does not mean that there are no positive objects of identification at all. A Psychology of Christian Virtues, The Nucleus of Populism. I want you to act as you would in a crisis. However, our emotions lack a reference to a collective entity as a proper part of the community that has a life of its own. Indeed, indirectly I have already touched upon these objects of positive identification. The transformation of individual or private grievances, anger, and fear into strongly collective ones demonstrates how, in the political logic of populism, associations are built through dissociation and yet develop an existence of their own that transcends their purely antagonistic character. It was a popular philosophy that aimed to make the American people a better society, and it was a political Moral anger is commonly conceptualized as an emotion that involves judging that its object (a) has wrongfully harmed someone or something of value or (b) has failed to care about someone or something in the appropriate way. A new populist party riding the anger among Dutch farmers and rural communities at government policies to rein in agricultural pollution appears to be the big winner in provincial elections. This party, and more generally the collective entity of the people, is partly constituted by its commitment to radicalizing democracy. These phenomena show us that the classical liberal democracy Render date: 2023-03-18T04:36:53.908Z The current rise of right-wing populism is often associated with affects (Cossarini and Vallespn 2019a ), most prominently, affects from the fear and anger families (Rico, Guinjoan, and Anduiza 2017 ). The fact that a threat to one's descriptive and evaluative self-conception might express itself in aversive feelings does not imply, however, that overall changing oneself is always a bad thing. (2) In appealing to the affects of discontent and frustration, populism creates a general sense that something is going wrong. While discussions on the upsurge of populism have centred on institutionalised politics and politicians, only limited attention has been paid to how the success of the former and the latter was propelled by Webpeople.3 Studies of populism are not concerned with adjudicating whether such moral judgments are accurate, but rather with understanding when this form of politics becomes prevalent, why it is able to garner public support, how it affects existing configurations of political power, and what impact it has on political institutions and policy. Laclau's definition of populism as a political logic proposes an answer to these difficulties by rejecting the implicit premise that populism is an ideology at all. WebMore specifically, it delves into the matter of the impact of populism on European institutions and civil society, setting out the idea of the Brussels bubble as a key aspect in its understanding. It was a political ideology that focused on farmers and laborers, and it embodied a vision of social justice and equality. In the following, I draw on recent research on political emotions and passions in the analytic tradition to sharpen their concepts and deepen our understanding of the role of affects in the political logic of populism. Populism is compatible with a variety of political perspectives but emphasizes the alleged homogeneous nature of the real people, with limited acknowledgment of difference and social division. However, as I will argue in what follows, some emotions and passions are of particular importance for the political logic of populism because they are particularly suitable to evoke a sense of crisis and to construct a morally laden frontier between the homogenous groups of the people and the establishment. It is this overt appeal to affects and the breaching of the dominating feeling rules that is characteristic of populism as affective politics. 1. First, there is a broad consensus in research on emotions that affectivity is constitutive of rationality rather than in conflict with it (Damasio Reference Damasio1994; de Sousa Reference de Sousa1987). But the possible persistence of populist economic thinking could be a We follow the minimal definition summarized by Mudde (Reference Mudde 2004), for whom populism is a set How, in other words, does it affectively unify the people? WebAs an often-quoted line goes, populism shaved its whiskers, washed its shirt, put on a derby, and moved up into the middle class When it did this, it became Progressivism. By contrast, Mouffe's (Reference Mouffe2018) account represents and defends a dissociative model. I thank the participants of the workshop Partisanship and Compassion in a Time of Populism (London 2019), the 7th Conference for Practical Philosophy (Salzburg 2019), and the Colloquium of the Department of Philosophy at the University of Jena (2019) for inspiring discussions. My anger is based on our collective commitment to the ideals of radical democracy. Roughly speaking, thin-centered ideologies are defined based on a small number of features (Freeden Reference Freeden1996). For example, we blame the government for ignoring our needs. It not only invites us to feel with others, but also invites us to make their standpoint our own: to recognize the legitimacy of their emotions, of the concerns on which their emotions are based, and of the political demands to which their emotions give rise. Love involves a desire for the well-being and flourishing of one's beloved, and enthusiasm involves a desire to defend and promote the idea about which one is enthusiastic. It is highly context sensitive, occurs in various countries and regions, and in different historical periods (Ionescu and Gellner Reference Ionescu and Gellner1970; Gidron and Bonikowski Reference Gidron and Bonikowski2013; Mudde and Rovira Kaltwasser Reference Mudde and Kaltwasser2014); it takes various ideological forms, reaching from the left to the right and from exclusionary to inclusionary (Mudde and Rovira Kaltwasser Reference Mudde and Kaltwasser2013); it occurs in different organizational forms spanning grassroots movements to highly organized political parties and is socially inhomogeneous. It was a political ideology that focused on farmers and laborers, and it embodied a vision of social justice and equality. (3) Populism appeals not only to individual emotions of discontent, anger, and fear, but also to empathetic, sympathetic, group-based, and shared ones. At the same time, in the background of my anger, there is, first, a concern for the party as the entity that defends the concern in question and that is partly constituted by it; second, a concern for the people in the name of whom the concern is held and defended; and third, a concern for the community as a whole of which the people is a proper part. In a meta-analysis of 217 studies by Paik and Comstock, effect sizes for experiments were r = .37 and r = .19 for surveys, which are small to moderate effects. Ernesto Laclau's (Reference Laclau2007) theory of populism and Chantal Mouffe's (Reference Mouffe2018) recent adaption of his theory in her defense of a left-wing populism provide a suitable starting point for such an endeavor. Often seen as opposites, the two factors are linked by some elements: both are described by their proponents as remedies to the legitimacy crisis that modern representative democracies are going through; both tend to define certain practices and principles of constitutional democracy that are insufficient to ensure effective governance The fact that the logic of populism is dependent upon the dichotomy between rationality and affectivity and the political and the private gives rise to the question of whether in a different world, where the realm of politics is identified with the realm of affects, and the hegemonic form of politics is a politics of emotion, populism might take the opposite formnamely that of a detached and dispassionate engagement. Appealing not just to evils that have already occurred but to subjective and intersubjective perceptions of threat and vulnerability (Reference Salmela and von Scheve2017: 570) too makes perfectly sense in the logic of populism because doing so enables a greater number of people to be mobilized. In doing so, it contributes to the construction of the collective entity of the people. Hostname: page-component-7dc689bd49-q9qq5 In terms of philosophy of emotions, the affective ties in question can more precisely be captured as empathetic and sympathetic emotions. Even more, one might defend the claim that the political is inherently affective because it fundamentally deals with what matters to us and affects are inherently political because they are fundamentally social (Szanto and Slaby Reference Szanto, Slaby, Szanto and Landweer2020:478). The global ascendance of populism has produced an explosion of research, bringing together scholarship in American and comparative politics as well as encouraging intellectual exchange among political scientists, economists, and sociologists. As occurrent affective states of mind, emotions have a specific phenomenal character. Intimacy, Identification, and the Social Nature of Persons, Emotion Work, Feeling Rules, and Social Structure, Strangers in Their Own Land. For example, populists politically present themselves as private persons or display bad manners, such as using slang, swearing, being politically incorrect or overtly passionate. By collectively committing ourselves to the principles and objects in question, we constitute the collective identity of the people. Moreover, it contributes to creating a sense of urgency because there are still (further) dangers to be warded off. Translated into the terminology of affect, this means that the affective tie to the people needs to transcend the affective tie to those concerns for matters of political import that, on the level of content, define the people. Populist attitudes as a motivation to participate. Some Further Thoughts on Populism, Exclusionary vs. Inclusionary Populism: Comparing Contemporary Europe and Latin America. Emotion, Reason, and the Human Brain, The Emotions. Moreover, it helps foster a sense of urgency since there is still something that is at stake, whereas, in the case of anger, the evil has already occurred, which is why anger motivates punishment rather than prevention. We love particular persons or objects and are enthusiastic about ideas, values, or principles. Populism is a political movement that promotes the idea that its leaders alone represent the people in their struggle against the elite establishment. As attitudes of radical investment, they involve a tension between the claimed unity and totality of popular demands on the one hand, and their plurality and partial incongruence on the other. Whether and to what extent an emotion is collective or shared depends on two factors. This will become even clearer in the next section in which I turn to the collective passions of enthusiasm and love. It involves some level of felt hostility and antipathy toward its object. Most importantly, Laclau and Mouffe conceive of populism as a logic or strategy rather than an ideology. The video is only a few seconds long. According to this picture, it is not a specific ideological content that defines populism but rather a specific form of doing politics. It was a political ideology that focused on farmers and It does so against the backdrop of a Laclauian conception of populism as a political logic that appeals to a morally laden frontier between two homogenous groups, the people and those in power, in order to establish a new hegemonic order. In the case of moral anger, this is typically a normative demand that we experience as violated. This idea is not bound to any specific ideology, but rather to criticism of the hegemonic social and political order irrespective of what this order looks like. For example, in her theory of political emotions, Martha Nussbaum defends loveespecially the love for one's nationas an important affect of liberal democracy (2013:20456). Empathetic and sympathetic emotions are crucial to both the political logic of populism and to social movements in general (Jasper Reference Jasper1998). What is characteristic of populism is thus not simply the fact that it is based on a dissociative rather than associative paradigm of the political, according to which associations are primarily constituted through dissociation rather than through commonalities. Similarly, Michael Walzer tries to reintegrate the passion of enthusiasm into liberal theory (2002). This entanglement of active, conscious, and agential dimensions and passive, unconscious, and structural ones is more adequately captured by the conceptualization of populism as a political logicstyle (Moffitt Reference Moffitt2016: 2850) or mode of political practice (Jansen Reference Jansen and de La Torre2015: 8186). The video is only a few seconds long. Accordingly, the political logic of populism overtly embraces affects instead of suppressing or denying them (on this and the rest of the paragraph, see Moffitt Reference Moffitt, Cossarini and Vallespn2019). 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